Code isn’t the only thing causing your production failures
Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.
Episode notes:
Traversal is an AI-powered autonomous SRE for complex software systems with automatic triage alerts, root cause investigation, and incident prevention at petabyte scale.
Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or reach out to him at anish@traversal.com.
Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now!
Congrats to user aioobe on winning a Populist badge for their answer to Javascript a=b=c statements.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
From DevOps ‘Heart Attacks’ to AI-Powered Diagnostics With Traversal’s AI Agents
Anish Agarwal and Raj Agrawal, co-founders of Traversal, are transforming how enterprises handle critical system failures. Their AI agents can perform root cause analysis in 2-4 minutes instead of the hours typically spent by teams of engineers scrambling in Slack channels. Drawing from their academic research in causal inference and gene regulatory networks, they’ve built agents that systematically traverse complex dependency maps to identify the smoking gun logs and problematic code changes. As AI-generated code becomes more prevalent, Traversal addresses a growing challenge: debugging systems where humans didn’t write the original code, making AI-powered troubleshooting essential for maintaining reliable software at scale.
Hosted by Sonya Huang and Bogomil Balkansky, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
SRE: Site reliability engineering. The function within engineering teams that monitors and improves the availability and performance of software systems and services.
Golden signals: four key metrics used by Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to monitor the health and performance of IT systems: latency, traffic, errors and saturation.
MELT data: Metrics, events, log, and traces. A framework for observability.
The Bitter Lesson: Another mention of Nobel Prize winner Rich Sutton’s influential post.